Monday, January 11, 2010

For years Cuba has been playing with free Health Care and Education as its hobbyhorses against western democracies. It is not unusual to hear its leaders talk about those social human rights in contrast with our civil human rights. These issues are in a turning point in US national policy right now with the Obama’s Administration trying to overturn the old Health Care system with one sponsored by the government. Many of his critics had used the unfortunate case of Cuba as their spearhead against Obama’s plan.

Cuba has free health care coverage and education, but we are paying a high cost for it. Our civil human rights are crushed and those who had brandished our social human rights in contrast with our civil human rights are only backing a totalitarian regime. There is no word to justify what in essence is unjustifiable.

For those leftist-leanings who are quick to support the idea of alienate the opposition from the Socialist society, it would be clever to remind them the outstanding words of Rosa Luxemburg, a well-known communist:

“Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of a party, however numerous they may be, is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of the dissenter.”

And added:

"Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element".

Life dies out in every public institution. Just tell me if I am wrong: this is what is going on in Cuba, isn’t it?

There is free education in our country, at what cost? At the cost you gave up your will on behalf of the Communist Party. There is only one school system, one school program to teach to every child along our archipelago, there are only one history and one ideology. Our school system doesn’t allow any private school, any other philosophical approach to our past and our culture. Religions and philosophies differents than atheism and Socialism are banned from any level of education.

Just tell me if you allow, anywhere you are, to your government to take over your will and your own believes. And that is not at least the only problem that our free school system is having in today’s Cuba.

Under the pressure of their personal finances and their shattered homes, Cuban teachers had been leaving their schools and today are working anywhere else they could catch one dollar for their personal economy: as clerks in tourist institutions, self-employed selling any sort of artisan items, working in small family-run restaurants, leaving our country in any way possible and even teaching privately in their homes which is illegal.

As result, our school system is lacking trained personnel with enough experience to teach and to educate. Education is not only a simple repetition of terms, stories and knowledge. Education is a process that involves the creation of convictions, moral and social manners along with knowledge and behaviour.

Nowadays, you visit any Cuban school and what you find is uneducated people teaching values and topics in which they don’t really believe. People under the appropriate age to teach and behave as teachers. Many of them with an inappropriate language, lacking the necessary psychology and professional formation, and without experience and attitude toward the most basic and important profession in any society.

The same problems are faced by our health care system. Lack of professionals: they had been sent to Venezuela and other places worldwide to cover the inherited policy of Fidel Castro; but lack of professionals also because they are leaving our country in any way possible, mostly to US, and leaving the system to work inside Cuba in other trades, mostly closed to the tourist industry.

If you add our health care institutions are in ruins. Health care providers steal everything at their reach to sell it in the black market and obtain CUC, which is the only currency in which you can afford to live in Cuba. The salaries of them are ridiculous and can’t afford the cost of life in our country.

It is not so unusual to see a hospital being remodelled and a great percent of its construction materials leaving furtively from its premises to be sold in the black market, not too far away from it. When the institution is reopened it doesn’t take too long to star to find missing pieces here and there: a computer, a light bulb, medicines, towels and medical supplies. The whole institution is dismantled piece by piece and sold it out there.

The family doctor program was one of Fidel Castro’s wonders, published by him and by the system propaganda. Today, many of those family doctor offices are in pretty bad conditions, many of them lack their doctors, who had been sent to Venezuela, and even when you find one they lack of everything: from the piece of paper to write their prescription to even their attitude toward their patients.

They are all dreaming to leave the country or at least go to Venezuela and escape Cuba. A few of them heroically work with heart and soul for the profession they love, but many lack of incentive of any kind: money and soul, I would say.

These are the wonders of Cuba, the ones that Fidel Castro denounced in his trial in 1953 and made his future political program, at least according to him:

“The problem of the land, the problem of industrialization, the problem of housing, the problem of unemployment, the problem of education and the problem of the people's health: these are the six problems we would take immediate steps to solve, along with restoration of civil liberties and political democracy.”

Neither health Care nor restoration of civil liberties, and even free education are Cuba’s propaganda spread out around the world and repeated by lackeys and leftists who only know the pretty face of Cuba. But as we all know, even the moon has the other dark side who only a few us know very well.